Blog

For decades, addiction has been widely viewed as a chronic, relapsing brain disease—a model promoted by institutions like the National Institute on Drug Abuse and 12-step programs. However, the Freedom Model of Addiction , developed by Slate, Scheeren, and Dunbar (2017), offers a radically different view. It asserts that addiction is not a disease but a habit —a repeated, voluntary behavior based on perceived benefits. Like nail biting or overeating, substance use becomes hab

In an era when psychiatric treatment often meant forced hospitalization and heavy medications, two radically compassionate movements stood apart: The Soteria Project of the 1970s and the Quaker-run asylums of the 1800s. Though separated by centuries, both share a groundbreaking belief—that people experiencing mental distress can heal through kindness, dignity, and community , not coercion or chemicals. The Soteria Project: A Radical Experiment in Healing In the early 1970s,

For those who don’t believe that our very early years, especially if there was trauma involved, affect our adulthood, I suggest you reflect on where those self-destructive thoughts and behaviors come from. You most likely didn’t learn to think of yourself as a piece of shit or drink to blacking out or hide out in your house binging on doughnuts in just the last few years. Case in point: Today is the day before my school semester starts. And EVERY SINGLE DAY before EACH and EV

Pain, suffering, loss, guilt, shame, trauma, tragedy, death, violence, horror, grief, surround all of us on a daily basis. Life is really f*cking hard! It is easy to get swept up in feeling scared, vulnerable, angry, and hopeless. I was talking to a colleague the other day who said he felt that “ we are living in Hell right now .” However, I completely disagree. Yes, the world can be very, very harsh. There are horrific things happening every second of every day to many peopl

Stop screwing around - get pissed off and remember who you the f*ck you are, and get your life back! I’m saying this to whoever needs to hear it because I wish someone had said it to me - many times. I wasted so much precious time drinking too much or sitting at a casino or over-stuffing my face with crappy food or working jobs I hated, or staying in bad relationships way too long. All for falsely feeling in control, safe, and numb. And, if reading the first statement stings

I was asked by a colleague this week, “ Do you have a certain focus to your work? I mean, is there a central thread to what you do ?” That’s a great question, and the answer is a resounding “ YES !” So, I “ do ” several different things – solution-centered life coaching, run an empowerment workshop, teach the martial arts, and I work at both a homeless center and a residence for folks with mental illness. BUT, with ALL of these things, I have the exact same personal focus – t

Please don’t beat the shit out of yourself for being anxious sometimes. It’s perfectly normal. Life is goddamned scary as f*ck. Just turn on the news. If you don’t have some anxiety, you are a sociopath. And, FYI, we are the only creatures on Earth that know something is coming in our future. Not dolphins, or dogs, or chimpanzees. Do you know what we are singularly aware of that is coming? Yup – death. We know that someday, our friends, our family, and ourselves are going to

“ The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are. ” Joseph Campbell To embrace this privilege, you have to remember Who. The. F*ck. You. Are. Who you REALLY are. NOT who your parents taught you that you are. NOT who your assh*le peers in school told you you are. NOT who your f*cked up and traumatized brain continuously tells you who you are. NOT who your significant other tells you who you are. NOT your friends, the media, social media, the so-called professionals, your col

People ask me all the time why I help the homeless, mentally ill, drug addicts. They ask why I even give a sh*t about these “ losers ” who have obviously “chosen” to live the life they live. Ironically, these people questioning me are many of the same people who quote Jesus, Gandhi and other spiritual leaders on Facebook. So, why I have I chosen to spend my life helping these “ undeserving ” people? Because – they are my brothers and sisters. They are human beings just like m

As long as I can remember I go through periods – daily, weekly – where I feel horribly “ off ”. I’m bored, irritable, anxious, sad, empty, obsessed and about a hundred other negative adjectives I could use to describe how I feel. Over the years I have been diagnosed with PTSD, anxiety disorder, ADHD, depression, OCD, and “ mild ” bipolar disorder. LOL, all the " Ds ." I recently decided to stop trying to figure out the “ why ” and even the “ what ” of my problems and figure o

I was talking to someone this morning about how childhood trauma affects us in adulthood. And trauma can be a number of things, right? Sexual/physical abuse, the loss of someone close, chronic medical issues, living with a parent that has a serious mental illness or an addiction issue, severe bullying etc., etc. Remember, we are children when this is happening. Little, tiny people trying to figure out what’s going on around us and why. We are small, but our brains are like sp

I have been preaching for years to individuals dealing with mental health issues that “ you are NOT your diagnosis !” But I heard this concept said in a much more eloquent and universally applied way today. Brian R. King, who has MS, cancer, ADHD, and dyslexia, said of his “ issues ” this: “ Those illnesses I deal with day to day are not my headline; they are simply articles or even paragraphs o f who I am .” What a f*cking awesome way to look at yourself as so much more than

Everything I do is about helping people get unstuck. Why? Even though I have spent most of my life researching, teaching, and applying the principles of empowerment, I’m very human and imperfect and have found myself stuck numerous times. And it’s a crappy place to be. Anxiety, self-doubt, regret, shame, aloneness, and hopelessness kick in like a whirlwind from Hell. So, when I teach the martial art of Aikido, I show students how to relax and use their intrinsic strength to d

Many of us are going to be manipulated into feeling like sh*t because we are single this Valentine’s Day. So, I am dedicating this post on why NOT to feel like sh*t, and actually feel fantastic. And just for the record, I am a hopeless romantic. I LOVE being in love, but I also love myself, enjoy my own company, and work on my own passions when I’m not in a relationship. Anyway, here’s my post about Valentine’s Day: “I never found a companion that was so companionable as soli

So, I was working with one of my coaching clients yesterday who was having an agonizing week filled with anxiety and deep sadness " out of nowhere ." He is a young man who has never experienced much in the way of mental health type issues. When we first started talking this afternoon, he told me that he was going to get an MRI of his brain to check for a tumor and have his heart checked to make sure there was nothing seriously wrong with him. I'm not a doctor, so I said if he

We do NOT have to be prisoners to life. I was talking to someone yesterday who feels stuck in several ways – financially, relationship, and educationally. I kept pointing out the things she DID have available, how far she’d already come, and the considerable benefit of rediscovering where she wanted to go. For everything I said, she had a defensive answer for why those things didn’t mean anything and wouldn’t work to help her move forward. These conversations are the most f*c

For the folks out there who do any kind of writing. I heard a fantastic quote today! The person said “ don’t be afraid to bleed on your keyboard .” Meaning, don’t be scared to be vulnerable, to show people who you really are, what you have been through and what you believe in. And this can be applied to those of you who speak or teach or paint or whatever. I think the world needs more of us to be fearlessly open, to share our stories, to have REAL conversations about less tal

To get unstuck, you HAVE to challenge your “ story .” Challenge your supposed identity. All my clients have a negatively skewed sense of who they are. They have been taught by their parents, friends, teachers, and eventually by themselves that they are someone far less than who they really are. Their stories are abundantly filled with their mistakes, flaws, failures, and f*ckups. If they have spent ANY time in our “ wonderful ” mental health system, then they have recited the

When I was a kid, I lived in a house on a very short, dead-end street. Walking past my house, one would enter a wooded field. In the middle of these woods was a water tower in the shape of a flying saucer. The top half was metal down to a five-foot drop onto the middle to bottom half, which was all grass. During the winter, dozens of kids, including me, would sled down the water tower, which was now covered with snow. We’d trudge up to the top, then fly down, take the substan

By Lacey Severins: Flip on an action film of the '70s, '80s, or '90s, and you are likely to see the high-flying, acrobatic martial arts moves of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, or any number of talented martial artists that impressed the Western world with their unique style of defense and fighting. Whatever forms of martial arts we, the audience, were witness to, the physicality was undeniable. Their movements' pure athleticism and ferocious nature were, and continue to be, excitin